ARLA Propertymark has put out a call for agents to provide support to vulnerable tenants...

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More progress is expected today in the passage of a Bill which will allow good tenants’ rent records to count towards their creditworthiness.

The Creditworthiness Assessment Bill - started in the House of Lords by Big Issue founder Lord Bird - today gets a Second Reading in the House of Commons.

Currently rental payments of the UK’s 11m renters do not contribute to their creditworthiness in the same way as, for example, mortgage payments.

Substantial numbers of lettings bodies like NALS and credit organisations such as Experian are broadly in favour of the proposal.

Today’s debate in the Commons comes as data from consumer research company Equifax suggests the principle of rent contributing to creditworthiness has won the support of 80 per cent of the British public.

A survey conducted with YouGov shows 48 per cent of tenants never expecting to own their own home, with almost half of them blaming the size of the deposit as being the chief obstacle.

When asked to imagine they were buying a house, 29 per cent of renters said they would expect to be able to get a mortgage with payments similar to their current monthly rental payments, while a quarter believe they could access a mortgage with monthly payments higher than their rental payments.

Homeowners are much more confident they’ll be able to get credit than renters - in the same survey, 41 per cent of owners expected it to be very easy, compared to 11 per cent of tenants.

Nearly a third of renters have been turned down for credit, compared to just 14 per cent of home owners.

For renters who’ve been denied credit, almost half were told by lenders that they didn’t have a high enough credit score.

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As the UK's first and biggest rent reporting service CreditLadder is in great support for this Bill. We are welcoming new landlords each day who are encouraging their tenants to sign up for rent reporting. Landlords see their tenants encouraged to pay on time. The tenants are rewarded in doing so.

i agree with you paul, but it never work that way. bad tenants are the ones not getting their deposit back and yet they are the ones complaining not getting deposit back despite not paying rent and causing damages to the house despite having inventory to prove the fact. citizen advice bureau refused to deal with landlord when they got tenant going to them due to conflict of interest. yet they failed to accept the fact that tenants do not pay rent and cause damage to property. bad tenants have bad credit. it goes without saying. not only do they not pay rent. they do not pay their utility bills apart from council tax as they just move out and the unpaid bills goes towards higher electricity and gas to others in the uk. this includes having companies writing letters to the rented house after they left pursuing unpaid utility bills phone bills unpaid loan etc etc. thats the main reason why they dont have sufficient credit. the policy maker really should look at the majority of rouge tenants instead of harping on the few landlord who can easily be rope in by the council instead of making the rest of the good landlord pay the price and effectively pass it on to tenants. tenants often caused the damp and mould issues and blame landlord and now the politician is going to give tenants power to sue landlord for the inhabitable state of the houes? this is so typical of us UK politicians. you dont find that anywhere else in other countries.

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